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Keeping and cataloguing

Author	Post

Posted by Eric: Mon May 7th, 2012 12:56

1^st Post

There is another thread debating the relative merits of different software packages. I was intrigued by some of the comments regarding the numbers of photos people have kept and catalogued.

This is genuine enquiry as to why you keep and 'bother' to catalogue your images? Do you have a frequent need to search and sort your images? Do you really keep so many photos, just in case you may need them in the future?

I don't know how many shots I have taken both socially and commercially over the last 30years. But I cannot remember 'losing' an image and never 'needed' extraordinary search assistance, to retrieve an image.

I say this, not to cause offence or question everyone's personal recall skills...I would like to know how the sort of cataloguing you mention would help me?

I genuinely don't understand how putting all your photos in one big pile, then getting software to sort it out again is better than compartmentalising the photos into folders in the first place.

Commercially I have a range of clients. Their images are stored in folders bearing their name and the month. Each year the folders are restarted.
I may do 1 or 2 hundred shots on the day, but after the client selection the majority of the images are never needed or even thought of again. So why put them in a catalogue?

Maybe it's the type of work I do?

But this approach has rubbed off in my social photography. I know where and when the image I want was taken ...before I hit a key.

I am sure most of you guys can do this as well.

So I do wonder how changing my whole method of referencing images would be of benefit?

What am I missing?

Edit.. Forgot to add ...I can understand if you are taking repeated shots of a similar subject (flowers, insects or some specialised category) it could be beneficial to search 'pink flowers' or 'red spiders' . But for general photography across a range of subjetcs I am unsure.

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Eric

Posted by blackfox: Mon May 7th, 2012 13:14

2^nd Post

i,m with you on this one eric ,got thousands of images over the last few years ,back up onto a separate hard drive yearly to have a clean computer but i can tell you where and when every shot was taken just by viewing it ,mind you twenty odd years of taxi driving is supposed to make the brain work so perhaps its just us two ,now where did i leave my camera :banghead:

Posted by jk: Mon May 7th, 2012 15:23

3^rd Post

I keyword every photo I keep if only to locate it to a country and location. Thereafter I cant be bothered to put in too much extra keyword data.

I can usually remember which country it was taken it so having that keyword reduces the count then I can usually remember the year and content. So I would keyword with Spain, Trees, Leaves, Autumn for a picture I took in Spain of autumn leaves. I dont take too many pictures of the same thing unless I am doing a particular theme and anyway I can always add '2010' or whatever year to narrow the search further.

All my pictures are in directories by camera and country/month/year e.g. Spain-May2012. I also do Dance-May2012 and if I was in Australia or wherever I would have a directory of Australia-May2012.

Lightroom automatically catalogues by date and time.

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Posted by Constable: Mon May 7th, 2012 15:47

4^th Post

Eric

I keyword my macro work ... by common and latin name and also by class (beetle, cricket etc.). Otherwise it is impossible for me to remember when (if not where) I saw anything. As i tend to archive by date, keyword searching is critical.

Yes I know I could archive by type, but that is too much like hard work.

Otherwise, key wording is to a minimum.

Posted by jk: Tue May 8th, 2012 04:19

5^th Post

I think that approach is best unless you are curator of an image library selling banks of images.

I can find most images I want by doing a search on date and my likely keywords then at least I only have 20-50 images to look at rather than searching through 100000+ images.

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Posted by richw: Tue May 8th, 2012 04:40

6^th Post

Well I'm just a hobbiest but I'll give you my tuppence worth.

There are certain things I choose to keyword, for example if I search 'Mum', I'll get every photo I have since 2005 with my mum in it. It's also so easy to do, - so why not? I do keep far too many shots though, so my catalogue is probably much larger than it should be.

My workflow is entirely base around Lightroom, and this means it is very streamlined.

Posted by Squarerigger: Tue May 8th, 2012 08:08

7^th Post

I use Aperture and it forces me to get organized. All photos are broken into Projects, Folder, Albums, etc. So 1 of my projects is Vacations and under that Project I have Albums for each vacation we take with all the photos in there. Another Project is Nature Shots with Albums for flowers, animals, nudist camps (just kidding) etc. I think you get the idea. I also keyword all family photos.

Probably too elementary for you guys but it is easy for me to find everything I need.

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Posted by TomOC: Tue May 8th, 2012 20:12

8^th Post

I keyword every image. Even took the time to go back to my early BW negs and scan and keyword them.

If I want to make a blurb book about dogs, simple to find every dog I ever shot.

If Marianne wants to make a book, I set her up at my imac and run media pro and let her knock herself out with searches.

I probably tend to keep more shots than I should - but then, later many that seemed worthless can be used in collage pages or in an out-take section of a book.

A lot of things, like events or a particular house I shot might be as easy to find by searching on the folder name, but then I do have that, too, but it is also nice to be able to sort on Bedrooms or Patios.

Do I search often - maybe a few times a month for a single shot, but then when we make a blurb book, we will use it for hours at a time.

I guess my answer is - why not do both.

Getting started is the hard part, especially if you have 30 years worth - maybe too much work to justify. But if you have a small data base now, it would be silly not to take a few extra minutes to keyword as you archive...

Haven't you ever spent half an hour trying to find a certain photo? With a data base, it should never be more than a few minutes to run a few different searches and find just about anything.

Then again, maybe I'm too anal :-)

Tom

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Posted by KirkP: Fri May 11th, 2012 00:59

9^th Post

Long folder names, sometimes long filenames too. Used to be a major pain in Windows 3.1 days....

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Posted by Ray Ninness: Sun May 13th, 2012 11:22

10^th Post

Zactly Eric???

I have been assembling images for a book on motorcycle racing back in the 70's. And as I go through all those old negative, scanning and trying to make something understandable out of the lot!! I can remember riders names, places, incidents, like it was yesteray, and I can tell you my image storage techniques back then consisted on a folded sheet of 8.5X11 paper and the barest if any notations.. So I guess I have come a long way today!!

Today I have my image drive set up by year, and everything I put into those files is identified by a simple reference to what is in the folder, period..

I have had tons of help trying to use one or the other of several image cataloging software's, and it just doesn't work for me???

Something along the lines of "Teaching and Old Dog, New Tricks" I assume!!

:diggingahole:

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Posted by Doug: Sun May 13th, 2012 17:39

11^th Post

Well in the old days you might photograph a family event and produce the most beautiful portrait of a family member

If you had a catalog system based on date, it would be easy to come at your system looking for that specific date and find the complete set of images, with the great portrait being among them, but can you truly remember all those dates? - perhaps if you remember the event as a wedding or specific birthday, but you are either a savant or a liar if you can just remember where every image is

So how would you prevent yourself at time of capture from 'losing' this beautiful portrait when you are looking for portraits of family members 10 years later?

Moving it into a 'portraits' folder' would then mean it was 'missing' from the original event folder
Copying it into that folder just wastes space on your drive and causes confusion later on when you end up using a file that has not been edited instead of another that you might have worked on
Renaming the file or folder to include the word portrait might work, but that is yet another recipe for confusion later on (at best it just slow you down while you scan with your eyes what you could have already discovered through using your computer's much fast 'brain'*

A decent catalog system allows you easily to catalog images so they appear to exist in multiple places within your catalog
Keywords 'Portrait, Maggie, John's Wedding' allow easy searching and Smart Albums automagically fill with photos as you import and keyword

Smart albums and searching examples might include;
Show all photos with keyword Maggie, aperture of f2.8 or above
Show all Macro shots where lens info shows the use of a particular lens
Show all photos related to John
Show all photos related to weddings
Show all photos that are not 2:3 or 3:4 (will pull up all your 1:1, 4:4 (8x10) images that might have been scanned)
Show all images with the keyword 'portrait', a rating of 4 star or better and shot with a focal length of 50mm

Should you organise your images into a folder structure that manages files in a familiar way? Absolutely Yes, but don't eschew a catalog system you have yet to understand and never will until you have spent some time adding keywords and ratings and then using them in earnest

BTW - what happens when you require someone else to sort through your images (i.e.. when you are to busy or just plain gone)
Perhaps your family or successor should just labour through your collection with no signposts or directions?

*I teach people how to use computers 1on1 and I am amazed at how often they will spend several minutes visually scanning a webpage/document/folder for a particular word when they could have already found and done what they needed to do through search

BTW Learning to search is like learning to drive. You will have a few false starts, but once you have learnt how, it will happen without effort or conscious thought

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Posted by jk: Sun May 13th, 2012 18:32

12^th Post

I always use in my keywords in my flamenco shot the name of the dancer who appears so I can always find every picture of that dancer at any time.

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